The deregulation of telephone companies, or Telcos, has lead to increased competition. In many cases, Telcos and other carriers, are freed by statute to offer to any other competitor with carrier status, substantial discounts designed to level the competitive playing field for the network access or bandwidth delivery portion of the access market. Then more bandwidth is available at a cheaper price than was previously possible. However, bandwidth and services are often bundled together and sold. Thus, many of the savings and benefits of the cheaper bandwidth are not realized by the user.
Thus, there is a need for an application level or logical level control mechanism for communication services used in support of various peer-oriented types of applications. There is also a need for a control mechanism that is orthogonal to the underlying native control mechanisms of the network being used. In other words, the control mechanism would function regardless of the intervening control mechanisms of the network. This capability allows application developers to use network services as components of their applications with minimal concern for the implementation of those services. Thus, the cheaper bandwidth may be purchased from telcos, without the added costs of attached services.
These needs will become apparent from the following text. For a number of years now, telecommunications and networking have been assuming increasingly strategic roles supporting the fundamental structure and operation of companies. One milepost that may be noted on this evolutionary path comes from an article in Business Week magazine published in the issue of Feb. 8, 1993. This article entitled "The Virtual Corporation" popularized the discussion of management concepts and practices that had been discussed in organizational management literature and practiced to varying degrees by organizationally sophisticated companies for some time. The introductory comments on the topic printed on the magazine's cover provided the framework for considering the topic:
Big, complex companies usually can't react fast enough. Small, nimble ones may not have the muscle. What's the answer? A new model that uses technology to link people, assets, and ideas in a temporary organization. After the business is done, it disbands. It's called the virtual corporation. Just another management fad--or a vision of the future?
Although the seeds of recent telecom and networking phenomenon are present within these introductory words, the current explosion of technologies, products, and variations for their strategic and tactical use was not fully foreseen or understood or at least was not expressed at this point in time.
In today's business environment, there is not so much of a revolution as there is a super accelerated evolution in the economic and information fabric in which business operates. Information accessibility and electronic connectivity combine to provide the equalizer on the frontier of global business and economic opportunity. As communication and networking technology developers seek to keep up with the escalating demand for more dynamic and easier communication capabilities, there is a shift in their market orientation. This shift in technology providers' approach to their market may be viewed as an indication of underlying environmental forces which will favor significant architectural changes in the structure of networks and the mode of creation for network services supporting collaborative applications.
In looking at the primary market approach, two fundamental orientations can be identified: the technology push and the application pull. The technology push orientation says "tell us what your network-related problems are and we will show how to solve them using a set of products." The application pull says "here are application level solutions to problems that your business currently has or is likely to have based on the evolution of the business environment and this solution is currently implemented using a set of products." The technology push is traditionally associated with manufacturers and generic networking resellers and integrators, whereas the application pull is normally associated with the true vertical market specialists.
Projecting the technology push and application pull orientation into the solution mindset of target market potential customers highlights the two corresponding dominant customer orientations: network centric (associated with the technology push orientation) and application centric (associated with the application pull orientation). Telcos and Competitive Access Providers (CAPS) can be used to illustrate these points for network resource providers, but it is important to realize that similar distinctions exist within end-user organizations where the network support organization generally holds network centric views, whereas the operating business units generally hold application centric views.
The network supplier market as represented by Telcos and CAPS, especially in the U.S., provides an interesting example with which to illustrate significant aspects of these differing orientations to the potential customer solution evaluation process. Since the start of deregulation and the opening of network access to competitive pressures, there has been an evolutionary force, i.e. competition, at work on the structure and basic business positioning of Telcos and businesses that would compete against them. Prior to the start of open competition for the network access market, the Telcos, as well as their limited competitors the CAPS, can be characterized as holding primarily what has been called network centric views of solutions. Characteristic of this view is the bundling of service and feature differentiators with combinations of "raw" bandwidth delivery infrastructures to create "products" which would be sold in a manner consistent with the technology push orientation. A case can be made that much the same situation currently exists within the network support groups that currently support the network infrastructures upon which the applications of large, medium and increasingly small companies are deployed.
With the coming of open competition in the network access markets, however, pressures of the new business environment have caused a fundamental shift in the structure and the business approach of such organizations. Specifically, what had been the service and non-connectivity related features of the "product" (aggregately identified as the "product differentiators") are rapidly being separated from the bandwidth delivery infrastructure and moved into non-regulated business units that function at the retail level and which compete with resellers, network integrators, and vertical market specialists. This evolution has been caused largely by new regulatory statutes that force the Telcos, or any other carrier, to offer to any other competitor with carrier status, substantial discounts designed to level the competitive playing field for the network access or bandwidth delivery portion of the access market.
This business environment situation has started an irreversible shift in the value creation chain for telecommunication services in which the biggest "added value" link will shift from the "wires" business associated with bandwidth transmission and delivery to the "product differentiator" services and features. The monolithic product set once associated with the telecommunications industry has been split into an interoperable bandwidth transport and delivery access infrastructure commodity and a separate service/feature creation opportunity that has significant potential for differentiation and value creation. This evolutionary transformation, which is now underway, has significant implication for the marketing channel mix of networking product vendors as the relative importance of technology push versus application pull orientations seek a new equilibrium in the new business environment.
One of the bandwidth transmission mediums is the asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM, transmission medium. The current service creation and network control architectures fail to adequately harness the potential flexibility of the ATM transport mechanism. The potential to carry any type of traffic, along with the ability to link terminating points over a mixture of public and private network resources in an on-demand fashion, opens up a whole new realm of technological challenges and economic potential, the ramifications of which are only beginning to be grasped.
However, despite the available bandwidth, there is still a need for the ability of individual end-users, or peers, to have the ability to set up and control services that have been typically set up and controlled by the telcos.
There are at least three potential reasons which might help to explain why this need has not already been met. First, a reliable, distributed, peer-oriented service creation facility is more difficult to develop as compared with currently existing telecommunications service creation mechanisms. Existing mechanisms may be viewed as utilizing a client-server model in the sense that a session requests a certain service capability from the network and the network control function responds by determining if the resources are available and then signaling to switches to establish the service. Part of the added complexity for a peer-oriented mechanism comes from the use of active peer-agents negotiating to set up and maintain a requested service. Some of the factors involved which contribute to this additional complexity include problems of managing distributed threads of control, including problems of process synchronization, as well as the greater risk of message loss or corruption introduced through the increased use of communication links connecting the collaborating processes which greatly increases the need for additional fault detection mechanisms.
The second reason which may contribute to the lack of such a solution concerns the evolution and current state of the public telecommunications networks. Metropolitan and wide-area networks are generally established utilizing the physical facilities of public telecommunications carriers. The networks that these carriers have deployed have evolved from networks which were originally established to handle analog voice traffic through switched circuit technology. A case can be made that much of the current architecture for service creation has come to be as the result of incremental response to evolutionary trends in service needs and resource capabilities as well as the cost structures that were associated with possible development path options. The development and introduction of ATM has provided the first standards-based transport mechanism that is designed to support all types of traffic. When combined with the User Network Interface (UNI) Staff ATM Forum (1995) and the Private Network to Network Interface Staff ATM Forum (1995) developed by the ATM Forum, a case can be made that the basis for an alternative user-controlled network service creation and control paradigm has been created. So, the second reason such work has not been performed is that there was no compelling reason to undertake what is a much more difficult architecture to design and implement as long as the network was predominantly a circuit-switched infrastructure.
The third reason concerns the growth of capabilities in the areas of both hardware and software. In order to develop a service creation process which utilizes a distributed architecture functioning in a real-time collaborative mode, great demands are placed on the hardware and software system components. An observation might be made that the rapidly dropping cost of processing power, along with the advances in methodologies, CASE tools and the development of middleware platforms are enabling factors that needed to be available before distributed systems approaches to communications infrastructure could go forward on a commercial scale. Therefore, the third factor which might be considered as hindering similar research in the past is the potentially diminished interest due to the inadequacy of the commercial tools and techniques then available.
Thus, there is a need for an application level or logical level control mechanism for communication services used in support of various peer-oriented types of applications. There is also a need for a control mechanism that is orthogonal to the underlying native control mechanisms of the network being used. In other words, the control mechanism would function regardless of the intervening control mechanisms of the network. This capability allows application developers to use network services as components of their applications with minimal concern for the implementation of those services.